Poetry, Art, Medicine & Society

Bad Manners, Freud, and Sophocles

Doing 60, 90, 120…ignoring or liberally interpreting the yellow “RIGHT LANE ENDS, MERGE NOW” sign, the driver of a white pick up truck scattering gravel in the break down lane passed us and cut us off, the raised bumper inches from ours, the dual exhaust rumbling. I was captaining our station wagon. My beautiful wife sat next to me, her hand proffering reassurance to my shoulder.
“Just ignore him,” she said, reading my mind (the lower, primitive regions of the limbic system, amygdala and hippocampus) or the adrenalin gauge (not on the dashboard) with its indicator at the redline.

Instead, I ignored her, tailgating and then swerving in front of the truck at the next available opportunity—a straightaway after a service station where the road widened from one lane to three, allowing for left and right turns into strip malls, as well as the occasional drag race. The lackadaisical evening traffic and numerous stoplights, however, made this particular use tenuous.

Fortunately for us, the driver, after gunning past one more time, swooped off the road into a liquor store parking lot without taking further heed of my challenge. He probably had a jiggling beer cooler on the front seat in need of replenishment, to go with a (fully legal) handgun in the glove compartment. I escaped the confrontation with only an earful from my wife for risking my life, and hers: minor damage.

In fact, I’ve mostly gotten pretty good at defusing such situations, mostly by defusing myself in time. But sometimes caught in the wrong mood at the right moment…I…The funny thing is, were I to come across the obnoxious operator of said truck at a revolving door or in a movie line, each one of us might well have said, “after you.” Somehow, climbing into a car’s personal space with its anonymity and raw power deactivates the courtesy that keeps us from each other’s throats.

Manners, as a word, suggests a kind of officious veneer associated with prep or finishing schools, a gratuitous expertise in the social graces. The well-mannered individual always uses the correct fork for his salad, and gets his thank-you cards written punctually. But I postulate here that at least on the roads and highways of America good manners can save your life. We’re a short tempered and irritable society (at least while motoring) and a violent one. Perhaps there’s a connection? According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, aggressive driving accounts for one third of “accidents” (my quotation marks) and two thirds of automobile fatalities. That’s frightening. On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a thoroughfare I frequent, two women were killed a few years ago after the driver of another car, angered and retaliating over an unintentional “slight,” caused theirs to lose control and crash. If he’d displayed just a hint of the gallantry he might have on foot, he’d be a free man today and two women would still be alive.

According to Freud, we are motivated by sex (Eros), and death (Thanatos). I would agree with the first at least, though I think there are often less elaborate, in fact stupidly simple explanations for our behavior. For example, much has been written about the so called Oedipal conflict, which Freud hypothesized, where a boy subconsciously wishes for his father’s death because he harbors repressed desire for his mother. Sex and death, death and sex. But if we go back to Sophocles, the ancient Greek dramatist, and his Oedipus Rex, we find a much more banal kind of human foible at work.

Remember the story? An oracle forecasts that Laius will have a son who will grow up to kill his father. So Laius disposes of this son, Oedipus, binding his feet and leaving him on a mountain to subvert the fate decreed by the gods. The infant Oedipus survives and years later, as a grown man, finds himself face to face with his father. Except neither recognizes the other. Oedipus believes his father is the shepherd who raised him as a boy. Laius thinks his child is dead. So they are in essence strangers when they argue at an intersection over who has the right of way.

When Oedipus kills his father it has nothing to do with the superego, or the id, stifled libido. It’s a simple case of road rage, and fatuous as it sounds, bad manners. Had either one of them waved the other past with genteel deference, there would have been no bloodshed, no humiliating abdication, no suicide by Jocasta, no self-mutilation by Oedipus in his shame and grief and guilt. This variety of Oedipus complex isn’t complex at all. Unfortunately, like fate, neither is it trivial or easily avoided. And it takes its toll off the road as well, has done so for centuries in petty struggles over honor, pride, saving face. The gods and the playwrights could always count on us to be impulsive, ill mannered, and self-destructive. They still can.

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David Moolten

About me: I'm the author of three books of poetry, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005), and Primitive Mood, which won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and was published in 2009.

I'm also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine, and I live, write and practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Audio Files

'Cuda(Originally appeared in The Kenyon Review)

Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright(Originally appeared in The Southern Review)

Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright

I don't yearn for their steep excursion
Into fame and fortune, for it had
The usual price, and Orville died bitter
And Wilbur died young. I envy them
Only the slender and empty distance they left
Between them and a seaside's grassy bluffs
In mild December, the frail ingenuity
Of dreams, a lifetime's hopes made of string and cloth
And a little puttering motor that might have run
A lawn mower if the brothers had put their minds
To one first. For dumb exhilaration, nothing --
Not an F-16 thundering from its base
In Turkey nor my redeye circling O'Hare --
Comes close to what they must have felt
For less than a shaking, clattering minute
Clearing all attachment to the world
Of dickering and petty concerns: for some
No other heaven. So I take note of them
As they took notes from the lonely buzzard, obsessed
To the point of love with the ghostly air
And the small fluttering things that wandered
Through it. Eccentric but never flighty,
Bookish but not above nicking their hands
In bicycle shops and basements, they lived
With their sister and tinkered with the future.
Propelled by ambition, the mandate
It invents, they still heeded the laws
Of nature, trimmed needless weight, saw everything
Even themselves as burden, determined
Not to crash and burn. Sheer will launched them,
Good will, because those first forty yards
Skimming shale and reeds were for everyone.
Face down between the struts, staring at the ground
As it blurred past, they failed like anyone
To grasp the implications. But legs flailing
They hung on, buoyed by never and almost
And then just barely. I could do worse
Than their brief rapture, their common sense
Of purpose. Or I could, if only
For a moment, exalt them, go along
With the jury-rigged myth, the quaint
Contrivance that lets them rise above it all.

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